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Attentive and nearly conversational in his responses, the shooter explains why he'd come to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle on July 28, 2006. He offers nothing of the woman he'd executed during the shooting spree, and little of the five others he'd left mutilated by gunfire.

"I'm just trying to make a point," Haq tells the dispatcher, holding a pistol to the head of a pregnant woman as she bled from a gunshot wound he'd delivered moments before.

Listening to his own words played by his attorney for a King County jury Wednesday, Haq stared at the table and offered no sign of pleasure or regret at hearing them again. Slumped and paunchy in his sweater vest, the accused killer held himself with a stillness in stark contrast to the man caught on security video racing around the Belltown Jewish center.

Facing a jury for the second time, attorneys' opening statements Wednesday morning followed the course charted in the June 2008 trial. That effort ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict.

Haq, now 34, had suffered from mental illness for a decade before he drove from his Kennewick apartment to the federation building on Seattle's Third Avenue. At issue for jurors is whether, as his attorneys claim, that infirmity drove him to commit the slaying.

Addressing jurors, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Don Raz recounted the pains to which Haq went to plan the killing. He bought two guns days before, penned a prayer and an essay on perceived wrongs done to Muslims by Israel and the United States, then searched the Internet for a target.

"The state concedes that Mr. Haq has a history of mental illness," Raz said. "Naveed Haq's mental illness didn't cause him to attack the Jewish Federation. His anger did. His political views did."

Then as now, the facts of the crime are not seriously questioned by either side.

Arriving at the center's reception desk, according to police statements, Haq opened fire on workers there. Haq allegedly chased down Pam Waechter, already injured in the initial shooting, and shot her in the head as she tried to flee. Then, holding a gun to the head of another injured woman who was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, Haq gave his demands to a 911 operator.

Offering his name and Social Security number, Haq went on to demand that the United States military leave Iraq, complained that Muslims in the Middle East were "getting pushed around" by Israel and asked to be connected with CNN.

When the operator told him she couldn't make that happen, he agreed to surrender to police. Following the shooting, Haq made numerous anti-Semitic comments to investigators.

In addition to an aggravated murder charge which would carry a mandatory life sentence and several attempted murder charges, King County prosecutors have charged Haq under the state hate crime statute.

Speaking to the jury, defense attorney John Carpenter allowed that, if not for his mental illness, the shooting could only be seen "as a cold-blooded killing." But, Carpenter argued, that events set in motion months before the shooting damned Haq and his victims.

Haq, the attorney said, had long been known to experience psychotic episodes during which he believed he could read minds or hear inanimate objects speaking to him. He was diagnosed while in college in Pennsylvania and had been medicated since.

Despite his illness, Carpenter said, Haq had never had significant problems with the law. He was able to complete two bachelor's degrees, though his paranoia kept him from steady employment.

A change came in July 2005, when Haq's medication was changed and he was moved off of the lithium that had kept his psychosis under control for years, Carpenter said. With the change, he became increasing prone to incoherent violence -- he sparked a bar fight with a man who danced better than he did and got in two road-rage incidents -- and started taking long-distance road trips for no discernible reason.

That slide into madness, Haq's attorneys urged jurors to believe, ended in tragedy at the Jewish Federation building.

"Ultimately, his brain failed him, and Pam Waechter is dead as a result," Carpenter said.

Anticipating the defense argument, Raz noted in his opening statement that a Seattle police officer who, minutes before the shooting, pulled Haq over blocks away from the center found him to be calm and rational. After describing the shooting in detail, Raz submitted to jurors that Haq's statements following the shooting condemn him.

"He'd been thinking about this and decided this was what he needed to do," Raz said. "Haq's political statement got out, but at a high price."

Haq's trial is expected to stretch into late November. Haq remains confined at King County Jail; in addition to aggravated first-degree murder, he has been charged with five counts of attempted first-degree murder, unlawful imprisonment and malicious harassment, the state's hate crime statute.